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Comment by jbattle | Hacker News Reader

It's slightly shocking to read this and realize how many outright falsehoods these people were being told. It's almost wonderful that knowledge advanced when people were being taught stuff like this by authorities ancient and modern:

> Diodorus says, that near to the city Thebais in Egypt, when Nilus overflowing is past, the Sun heating the wet ground, the chaps of the earth send forth great store of Mice in many places, which astonishes men to see, that the fore-part of the mice should live and be moved, whereas their hinder parts are not yet shaped. Pliny says, that after the swaging of Nilus, there are found little Mice begun to be made of earth and water, their fore-parts living, and their hinder parts being nothing but earth.

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I think reading things which were believed in the past, and how they were justified, what 'proof' was held up, etc, is tremendously helpful. We can imagine re-walking their path and understand how they came to believe what they believed, and be confident that those techniques are not reliable. If you see those exact same justification or reasoning being used in modern times, you can know to be suspicious. You always have to account for the fact that a correct conclusion can be happened upon with an entirely wrong reasoning, but in most cases you will also have a head start on know how to disprove the conclusion if it's in doubt. It's surprising how often conclusions are abandoned, but the style of argument that supported them manages to stick around. You would think that if someone says 'clearly X is true because only an evil Creator would make it otherwise, and the Creator is not evil' but X is then thought to be false, that you couldn't justify anything else with the same argument, but its very common that they would just throw out X when it became impossible to ignore its truth, but preserve a whole host of ideas based on the same reasoning.

The thing is, we don't know what they were describing. There's a lot of strange things old records describe that do turn out to be true; I don't think it's wise for us to be so dismissive.

Agree - this kind of sounds like the description someone might ascribe to a sometype of mudskipper [1] or perhaps tadpoles [2] emerging from a drying creek bed (Re: "[when the] Nilus overflowing is past, the Sun heating the wet ground, the chaps of the earth send forth great store of Mice").

1.) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mudskipper

2.) https://images.app.goo.gl/NFuudEfvAfUoFRhP7

Yeah, but frogs and tadpoles are common across the world, so I find it hard to believe that the writer was not aware of tadpoles.

Out right falsehoods were not uncommonly produced as true facts of distant lands. For example, it is common knowledge that Ethiopians and natives of of the Indian subcontinent do not have heads, but rather have their face embedded directly into their chest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headless_men

Or if that is too fanciful, consider that the salamander’s natural habitat is fire.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salamanders_in_folklore

I ended up reading the lodestone section and realizing that it was a description of magnets.

Magnets were well known the Greeks in antiquity[1], likely because of the Magnesia region in Greece where natural magnets are commonly found[2]. Words like "magnet" and "magnetite" are named after that region.

In 1584, the magnetic compass would have been well known and understood, but the connection between electricity and magnetism was a long way off. Gilbert's De Magnete[4], which explained that compasses worked because the earth itself had a magnetic field, was published in 1600, not long after this book on "Magick."

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnes_the_shepherd

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnesia_Prefecture

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetite

[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Magnete

Which section is that?

http://www.faculty.umb.edu/gary_zabel/Courses/Phil%20281b/Ph...

On the flipside, is there anything in there that's actually true and isn't part of the modern common knowledge compendium?

Can't wait for computers to start actually understand text because reading 10 volumes where both the language and the way to think about things is - let's say - different is bloody hard.

Yeah, read the parts on disguises.

I love reading old texts... In part because they simply aren't read

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